Obituary for Prof. Paul Dubin

On May 23rd, 2018, Paul Dubin, Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, passed away at the age of 77. Dubin was born in 1941 in New York City to Carolyn and George Dubin. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, City College of New York, in 1962, and received his PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1970 under the supervision of Ulrich P. Strauss. He went on to postdoctoral studies with Frank E. Karasz at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and David A. Brant at the University of California, Irvine from 1970–1972. Dubin worked as a research scientist at Dynapol, Memorex Corp., and Clairol Research Laboratories before joining the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, where he remained for most of his professional life. In 2005 Dubin returned to the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a part-time Research Professor

Shoreline Dynamics Along a Developed River Mouth Barrier Island: Multi-Decadal Cycles of Erosion and Event-Driven Mitigation

Human modifications in response to erosion have altered the natural transport of sediment to and across the coastal zone, thereby potentially exacerbating the impacts of future erosive events. Using a combination of historical shoreline-change mapping, sediment sampling, three-dimensional beach surveys, and hydrodynamic modeling of nearshore and inlet processes, this study explored the feedbacks between periodic coastal erosion patterns and associated mitigation responses, focusing on the open-ocean and inner-inlet beaches of Plum Island and the Merrimack River Inlet, Massachusetts, United States. Installation of river-mouth jetties in the early 20th century stabilized the inlet, allowing residential development in northern Plum Island, but triggering successive, multi-decadal cycles of alternating beach erosion and accretion along the inner-inlet and oceanfront beaches. At a finer spatial scale, the formation and southerly migration of an erosion “hotspot” (a setback of the high-water line by ∼100 m) occurs regularly (every 25–40 years) in response to the refraction of northeast storm waves around the ebb-tidal delta. Growth of the delta progressively shifts the focus of storm wave energy further down-shore, replenishing updrift segments with sand through the detachment, landward migration, and shoreline-welding of swash bars. Monitoring recent hotspot migration (2008–2014) demonstrates erosion (>30,000 m3 of sand) along a 350-m section of beach in 6 months, followed by recovery, as the hotspot migrated further south. In response to these erosion cycles, local residents and governmental agencies attempted to protect shorefront properties with a variety of soft and hard structures. The latter have provided protection to some homes, but enhanced erosion elsewhere. Although the local community is in broad agreement about the need to plan for long-term coastal changes associated with sea-level rise and increased storminess, real-time responses have involved reactions mainly to short-term (<5 years) erosion threats. A collective consensus for sustainable management of this area is lacking and the development of a longer-term adaptive perspective needed for proper planning has been elusive. With a deepening understanding of multi-decadal coastal dynamics, including a characterization of the relative contributions of both nature and humans, we can be more optimistic that adaptations beyond mere reactions to shoreline change are achievable

Gender injustice in compensating injury to autonomy in English and Singaporean negligence law

The extent to which English law remedies injury to autonomy (ITA) as a stand-alone actionable damage in negligence is disputed. In this article I argue that the remedy available is not only partial and inconsistent (Keren-Paz in Med Law Rev, 2018) but also gendered and discriminatory against women. I first situate the argument within the broader feminist critique of tort law as failing to appropriately remedy gendered harms, and of law more broadly as undervaluing women’s interest in reproductive autonomy. I then show by reference to English remedies law’s first principles how imposed motherhood cases—Rees v Darlington and its predecessor McFarlane v Tayside Health Board—result in gender injustice when compared with other autonomy cases such as Chester v Afshar and Yearworth v North Bristol NHS Trust: A minor gender-neutral ITA is better remedied than the significant gendered harm of imposing motherhood on the claimant; men’s reproductive autonomy is protected to a greater extent than women’s; women’s reproductive autonomy is protected by an exceptional, derisory award. Worst of all, courts refuse to recognise imposed motherhood as detriment; and the deemed, mansplained, nonpecuniary joys of motherhood are used to offset pecuniary upkeep costs, forcing the claimant into a position she sought to avoid and thus further undermining her autonomy. The recent Singaporean case ACB v Thomson Medical Pte Ltd, awarding compensation for undermining the claimant’s genetic affinity in an IVF wrong-sperm-mix-up demonstrates some improvement in comparison to English law, and some shared gender injustices in the context of reproductive autonomy. ACB’s analysis is oblivious to the nature of reproductive autonomy harm as gendered; and prioritises the father’s interest in having genetic affinity with the baby over a woman’s interest in not having motherhood imposed upon her

On The Status Of The Concepts Of Masculinity And Femininity

Observer bias is considerable in studies investigating differences between the characters of the sexes, partly because masculinity and femininity are not empirical concepts. Instead, they function to sort out phenomena by determining a range of significance, thus encouraging discriminatory evaluation of human action. To support this I argue: 1. Particular character traits are assessed (valued and understood) differently depending on whether they apply to men or women. 2. Counterexamples to the generalization, All men are masculine, are not accepted as real counterexamples, but are rather regarded as abnormal (subnormal, not rare)

Aspects of the coloniality of knowledge

Looking at work on advocacy research, this article raises concerns about researchers, exploring and illustrating four aspects of the Coloniality of Anglo-European knowledge practice possible in such research. It suggests that it is not because we are able to be scholars that we are positioned to develop knowledge of marginalized others; it is because of how we are positioned in relation to marginalized others that we are able to be scholars. This article ends with a suggestion for an epistemic shift

Giving testimony and the coloniality of knowledge

This presentation is part of the Testimony and Listening track. The coloniality of knowledge involves epistemic framings and methodologies through which colonial orderings, including racial and gendered orderings, are naturalized and thereby normalized, such that the colonizing cultures come to be portrayed as the only producers of knowledge and that knowledge the arbiter of all that is known or knowable. I want to explore this in relation to the performance of voices giving testimony on the part of those marginalized by hegemonic understanding Recent innovative work in epistemology has involved re-valuing testimony as a source of knowledge, challenging standard methodologies of research that maintain the coloniality of knowledge by deauthorizing the testimony of the very people about whom the research is conducted. Concerns of advocacy researchers involve voices of those normally excluded from hegemonic discourse production. There are questions with regard to a researcher’s competency to hear an Other in order to be an advocate and also with regard to the relationality between the researcher and the subject (object) of knowledge; for Western scientific practice positions the researcher as a judge of credibility and a gatekeeper for its authority. In this paper, I take up questions arising from the positions of those giving testimony, including what they/we must do in order to speak, and investigate relationality in the process of knowledge production. One issue facing someone giving testimony involves whether those receiving it are assuming the information given will be ostensive, something clearly obvious to all, external to our minds, something which when pointed to becomes clear to anyone. A related issue concerns what the authorized knower is expecting in the way of performance from those giving testimony. Is the presumption of authorized knowers that those giving testimony will engage in what Doris Sommer calls “artless confession,” responding simply to the particular questions the researcher has constructed? A second point involves recognizing that we are interpellated in a field of meaning, that in order to speak (and be understood), we and our speaking must be recognizable in a field of meaning. As Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, if a lion could speak we would not understand him. That is, in becoming a knowing subject, someone marginalized and giving testimony must enter a frame of meaning within which the inquiry itself makes sense, and speak to an audience not normally used to hearing the sorts of things they have to say. My concern involves what marginalized testifiers are required to do to enter the field of meaning within which the testimony is to be given. A third point, as a result, is the possibility of having the meaning of ones words reversed when giving testimony, particularly if one is operating under the assumption of ostension. Consequently, a fourth point in thinking about testimony involves considerations of the listening audience and their worldview. So as a fifth point, I want to revisit the question of lying in giving testimony, as being at times conducive to the production of knowledge. A sixth point concerns the fact that there are multiple audiences, and more than the hegemonic domain of meaning. It is true we are never outside culture, or language, or discourse, but it does not follow that we can never move in spaces that do not carry dominant Anglo-European white phallic cultural logic, that there is no sense apart from that discourse. That is, we can and do meet each other outside the hegemonic discourse. In her paper, “On Complex Communication,” María Lugones challenges the liberal presumption of transparency and/or a shared vocabulary in communication, and argues that monologism is a way of silencing all contestatory interlocution. Consequently, a seventh point involves a question, How do marginalized peoples approach each other? How do we epistemically engage each other? Within what field of meaning do we insist other others meet us? I am specifically interested in how we meet in the construction and performance of knowledge. María Lugones points to a paradox: as marginalized others, even if we nourish a resistant logic with respect to our own marginalization, we may nevertheless paradoxically approach other others through normalizing, dominant logic. And Michael Horswell notes, “the issue should not be, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ but, in the colonial or any historical context, how to decipher his or her voice from the multiple utterances that form hegemonic discourse.” We are positioned in relation to each other through political identities that are not always or necessarily named but which are nevertheless enacted and resisted. My concern is the relationality between various marginalized people, particularly for our purposes, people who are themselves marginalized in some way hearing testimony from or about others who are marginalized. Hearing each other into speech is the epistemic question facing feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonialists. Anibal Quijano argues that the coloniality of knowledge keeps us from accepting the idea of knowing subjects outside the confines of modern epistemic rationality. Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo note that within Western intellectual practice, the coloniality of knowledge is a process of translating and rewriting other cultures, other knowledges, other ways of being, presuming commensurability through Western rationality. That is, our disciplinary practices are colonizing practices. Those of us who are educated in and inhabit the academy are trained to use our disciplines to render distinct cultural notions intelligible (“made to be presented to a Western audience” (Edward Said)) through processes of interpellation into Anglo-European cultural productions—Western concepts that we hold to be universal. In this paper I explore questions of the coloniality of knowledge in relation to the question of giving testimony

Social Justice and Water Sustainability and Management

As the challenge of maintaining adequate water quantity and quality mounts worldwide, increasing attention is being paid to the role individual behavior plays in water resources management. Yet water resources management has attracted very little scholarly attention by psychologists. This chapter identifies how selected theories and methods from social scientific research on justice might inform water related decision making. This chapter illustrates how insights from psychological research on social justice can be employed to advance water resources management. Social justice, including issues of institutional regulation and behavior modification, is an essential consideration in the design and implementation of sustainable strategies for managing limited natural resources. Like other ecological threats, water scarcity is “caused or exacerbated by human activities, and [it] can … be diminished or reversed by changes in human behavior, policies, or systems” (Oskamp & Schultz, 2006, pp. 82-83; see generally Bechtel & Churchman, 2002; Dean & Bush, 2007; McKenzie-Mohr & Oskamp, 1995). While psychologists have addressed environment-related concerns, such as resilience (Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, & Pfefferbaum, 2008), energy conservation and recycling (Oskamp & Schultz, 2006), and the psychosocial processes that underpin the work of environmental organizations (e.g., Dean & Bush, 2007), far less attention has been paid to water-relevant decision making. Still, there are several notable exceptions. For example, Bach (2004, cited in Oskamp & Schultz, 2006) demonstrated how principles of community-based social marketing (e.g., uncovering and targeting barriers to increased water-use efficiency) could be used to reduce Canadian citizens’ summer lawn watering. This study, and others like it (e.g., Corral- Verdugoa & Pinheiro, 2006; Gregory & Di Leo, 2003; Pahl-Wostl, Craps, Dewulf, Mostert, Tabara, & Taillieu, 2007; Schultz, Folke, & Olsson, 2007), illustrate that psychology is well positioned to provide guidance on resolving water management issues, specifically, and environmental issues more generally. This is because: • Individual behavior plays an essential role in environmental management. • The concerted actions of group members, and of the groups themselves, play an essential role in environmental management (i.e., group dynamics come into play). • Psychological considerations underpin all decision making, regardless of context, • Psychological processes underlie individuals’ sense of what is fair in allocating scare resources

Final report : Market-based incentives to reduce fisheries bycatch

This report represents a first step at considering the potential for the use of market-based incentives to aid in the resolution of fishery bycatch problems. Market-based incentives have several advantages over more traditional command-and-control approaches, including cost-effective allocations of environmental controls; incentives for firms to seek technological solutions; flexibility; returns to the public for the use of its resources; and lower administrative costs in some cases. Notwithstanding these advantages and with several notable exceptions, market-based incentives are almost never employed in the management of fishery bycatch problems. There may be several reasons why this is the case, including significant distributional effects, high costs of monitoring and enforcement, difficulties in educating consumers about product attributes, administrative and transactions costs, or merely oversight. We consider this report to be an "advanced outline" of the issues surrounding the consideration of market-based incentives. We begin first by developing in Section 2 a definition of bycatch, including a "typology" of bycatch types. Next, we compile available public information on bycatch in U.S. fisheries, as defined by target species, location, and gear type (Section 3 and Appendix 1). We then review, in Section 4, two potentially relevant strands of literature, the economic theory of multispecies fisheries and studies from other social sciences of how small-scale fisheries deal with problems of bycatch. In Section 5, we describe, in general, the kinds of market-based policy instruments that may be of use in managing bycatch problems. Following this evaluation, we identify and discuss, as case studies; three priority fisheries: th~ northeastern groundfish fishery; the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery; and the eastern tropical Pacific yellowfin tuna fishery (Section 6). Finally, in Section 7, we outline approaches to identifying appropriate policy instruments, including a qualitative comparison of market-based approaches, an examination of the effect of specific types of uncertainty on the choice between taxes and ITQs, and the development of a "proposal" for a bycatch management "policy package." This section concludes with a proposal for a set of priority market-based approaches to bycatch management in the three cases discussed in Section 6.NOAA Contract No. 50-DGNF-5-0017